WhiteShark5
commented
10 years ago Author: Randy Carey Blog Post 05/01/2014
Content strategy is concerned with an organization’s selection, creation, maintenance, and distribution of its content over the web. A triad of themes has been emerging among its thought-leaders: The emergence of diverse channels that convey content, the need to cleanly isolate content from format through self-contained fields or “chunks,” and a revolt against thinking of content in terms of the “web page.”
Multiple Channels: As the web evolves, we are acknowledging a proliferation of various channels that also would like to consume and distribute our content: RSS, email services like MailChimp, public news tickers, social media, smart TVs, digital magazines like Flipboard, Google Glass, high-tech watches, in-car systems, proprietary data centers, and even print. Over the coming years new channels and new types of data consumption will emerge – types that we are not currently anticipating.
“Chunks” versus the “Blob”: Because the web originated as static HTML pages that lived only in a website, we allowed ourselves to create content according to the familiar desktop publishing model – content, formatting, and layout are bound together, created and stored as a single field. Some content strategists are referring to this as a “blob.” As the web matured, we eagerly embraced the single-field blob as if it were a canvas and the WYSIWYG editor were our brushes. They allow users not only to add content but also to format that content as to how it will look on the web page.
Early in the web we recognized a problem when our formatting didn’t work consistently across browsers. The problem became more noticeable when the formatting was too presumptive and brittle to accommodate both desktop and mobile devices. As we enter the threshold of delivering content for channels that are even more diverse than a smart phone or tablet, we will need to rethink our “blob” approach. Content needs a clean separation from the formatting and layout that assumes a traditional web page. In a multi-channel world the paradigm of desktop publishing fails.
The alternative to a “blob” is to break its parts into a set of fields, or “chunks.” Together the chunks compose the same content as the single blob, but each field has its own semantic meaning. Format and aggregation of “chunks” are applied by each channel, not bundled with the content.
Think of the title, author, and date fields that are separated from the body of an article. Think of the various fields within a contact record (first name, last name, email address, phone, etc.). These are examples of “chunks” that contribute to the whole. Each can be formatted and positioned differently, or even ignored in some presentations.
Chunks help us resolve multiple issues. First, a well planned and structured set of chunks should alleviate our dependency upon formatting with a WYSIWYG editor – or at least to reduce the toolbar to a simple set of buttons that support semantics without imposing style or layout. A field can remain pure content as the CMS applies the needed format for any given channel.
Second, by chunking our data we can provide multiple versions of the same semantic piece of data. This allows any given channel the ability to select the appropriate version of any given field or digital asset. For example, fields like title or description can be represented with multiple versions each varying in length and wording. In the case of an image, a channel might benefit by being able to select from multiple versions that differ in how the image is cropped, by its file size, or by the depth of its color palette. (This approach to imaging is followed by Flipboard.)
Third, each channel might require a different set of fields. By breaking a blob into chunks we can deliver a the appropriate aggregation of fields – not the all-or-nothing “blob.”
Death of the “Web Page”: The historical perception of a “web page” leads us to accept (a) layout and formatting is naturally bound to content and (b) that content is targeted only to a the traditional web page (without regard to other channels). This leads to the CMS being seen as managing web pages, not managing content that can live across diverse channels. Any CMS that manages web pages instead of content is not ready for the multiple channels emerging across the Internet.
http://magazine.joomla.org/issues/issue-may-2014/item/2058-channels-chunks-and-the-death-of-the-web-page